Category: Advertising

Cybercrime and Terrorism Sponsored by Your Candidate

If you were watching TV and a show came on called How to Hack Computers and Commit Credit Card Fraud with a lead commercial from Bank of America, you might think there’s something amiss.  Like, where does the network get off airing a show specifically teaching people how to commit crimes?  And did BofA really mean to be the sponsor?  If not, they must be pretty pissed off at the network.  And if they did mean to be the sponsor, we consumers should be pretty pissed off at the network and the sponsor, right? That’s how the world of media and advertising works. Except on YouTube.

Digital Citizens Alliance released a new report last month covering a familiar theme with an election-year twist.  As the organization has reported in the past, advertisers who spend money to place ads on YouTube are essentially cheated out of some portion of their media buy when their ads appear in conjunction with videos selling or promoting criminal or terrorist activity.  I and others have cited examples of mainstream American brands unwittingly sponsoring ISIS recruiting videos or clips teaching people how to deliver malware to steal identities and data.  But this new report by DCA called Fear, Loathing, and Jihad calls attention to the fact that all of the current presidential campaigns are in one way or another sponsoring these criminal or terrorist-produced videos.  From the report:

“How does the Kasich campaign, whose credibility is based on fiscal aptitude and efficiency, feel about their ads showing up next to a video by those actively committing financial fraud?”

“Support from young voters is the main reason why Senator Bernie Sanders is able to challenge Hillary Clinton. Why would he want a campaign ad showing up next to a video demonstrating how to “slave” the computer of a young male victim?”   

Political ads are a variation on the larger theme of poor-quality placement that affects all advertisers in the digital market, but DCA is not wrong to point out the uniqueness of these dichotomous pairings when we see American presidential candidates effectively hosting videos calling for jihad or selling fake IDs and other contraband. Moreover, in several cases the candidate’s ad buy may actually be putting money into the pockets of the criminal video makers. So, it’s not farfetched to say that you can donate twenty bucks to your candidate and that money can end up in the pocket of some homegrown, would-be jihadist by way of Google AdSense and the YouTube Partner program. Unfortunately, it seems that Google is about as diligent in vetting YouTube Partners to participate in ad revenue sharing as it is in mitigating copyright infringement on its platforms.

According to Google’s own Terms and Conditions, a prospective Partner must upload “advertiser friendly content”, and here’s what the company says might be considered unfriendly:

Content includes, but is not limited to:

•Sexually suggestive content, including partial nudity and sexual humor

•Violence, including display of serious injury and events related to violent extremism

•Inappropriate language, including harassment, profanity and vulgar language

•Promotion of drugs and regulated substances, including selling, use and abuse of such items

•Controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphic imagery is not shown

Now, my own read of those conditions would want to to see them applied with considerable latitude given that plenty of high-quality satire, news reporting, and entertainment is likely to implicate any number of those descriptions.  But if Google is not able to, for instance, separate the combat-related humor in videos made by the veterans group Ranger Up and an ISIL recruiting video—or a video made by some jerk showing people how to invade a girl’s privacy through her computer—then maybe those conditions are really not conditions so much as they’re just a bunch of words Google universally ignores.

DCA states that when their reports and the news media have brought attention in the past to this same issue, YouTube has made an effort to remove ads from many offending videos, but the report also implies that this type of action is a band-aid in response to momentary pressure.  Just like infringing material is restored as fast as it is taken down, ads continue to be linked to videos that no brand—let alone any political candidate—would choose to sponsor.

Although advertisers do have a measure of control in setting parameters to properly target their ads, the automated nature of the system is nothing like the control advertisers have with traditional media buys.  As the report states, “Let’s be clear: Google is not giving advertisers the opportunity to veto undesirable videos, but to opt-in and minimize the possibilities of ads showing up in undesirable places.” As we see in the context of rights holders and the DMCA, Google’s own financial incentive is grounds to play ignorant and incapable and to shift the burden to everyone else.  Again, to quote the report, “Right now, the best thing you [campaign operative] can do is report the videos to YouTube, which may pull these videos down. Google has deputized all of us to do the work it can’t…or won’t.”

Speaking of incentive, why the leadership of Google does not display the basic human decency or corporate responsibility to delete these videos as clear abuses of their service is inexplicable beyond basic greed.  Because let’s be grown-ups:  free speech doesn’t even enter this conversation. Speech does not protect criminal activity, incitement to violence, or training in the commission of crimes; and it sure as hell does not protect the video productions of violent extremists whose agenda fundamentally betrays the natural rights philosophy upon which free speech is predicated. And more prosaically, any private company is within its right to provide or not provide content based on its own internal judgments without violating free speech.  But there’s the rub.

It seems that YouTube is in sort of a logical pickle, trapped between its safe harbor status from liabilities like copyright infringement and what could become a growing demand to guarantee quality impressions to the advertisers who pay all of the company’s bills.  In order to avoid liability for the millions of user-caused copyright infringements on the platform, YouTube has to maintain that it is blind to the content on its servers prior to a specific notification. Meanwhile, the advertisers (and frankly the public) would be better served if YouTube were to make a serious effort to remove videos that are clearly dedicated to promoting or abetting the commission of crimes and acts of terrorism.  But the more YouTube exerts this kind of editorial control, the thinner their veil of ignorance becomes, which can then expose the company to liability for copyright infringement and other abuses of its platform.  Meanwhile, as the monopolistic YouTube hovers in this limbo raking in millions, the advertisers, rights holders, and public are not well served.

The DCA report states that this year the presidential campaigns will spend $1 billion in digital advertising, with Google, Facebook, and Twitter receiving most of that revenue.  For perspective, the report explains that if Google takes the same percentage of that billion as it made from all digital US advertising in 2015, it will earn $387 million from campaign spending alone. Meanwhile, the company that claims to provide the tools of political transparency to the public is anything but transparent on this matter according to the report.  “We have no idea how much Google and YouTube make from videos marketing illegal or illicit activities,” the report states. “Google has fought back against elected officials and regulators who’ve asked questions about the money. So far, the company has been successful at keeping its numbers a secret.” Maybe the point at which political campaign dollars are being split 45/55 between Google and terrorists is the moment when federal regulators decide to get serious.

The Online Advertising Market with Andrew Orlowski (Podcast)

I haven’t done a podcast in a while but decided to reach out to technology writer Andrew Orlowski after reading his article Alphabetti Spaghetti:  What Wall Street isn’t telling you about Google.  Andrew is the executive editor of the IT news and opinion publication The Register, a critic of techno-utopianism, and coiner of the term “Googlewashing” to describe either purposeful or inadvertent censorship through search result rankings.

Andrew and I talk about trouble in the online advertising market, broader economic issues, and the politics behind the technologies we use.  I spoke to him at his home in the UK via Skype.

On Piracy and Promotion

Charlie:  Dad, how can you hate The Colonel?

Stuart (Scottish accent):  Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes you crave it fortnightly, Smart Ass!

– So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) –

As mentioned in much older posts, my father was an advertising professional, principally a creative director but also a manager.  And one lesson he preached to his colleagues, employees, students, and even to his clients was that good advertising can only sell a bad product one time.  In particular, there was one client I remember that probably danced with every agency in Los Angeles at one time or another, convinced that a fresh campaign could sell a particular offering to a certain audience they were simply never going to attract.

I think Dad’s axiom remains sound. If consumers really don’t want something, advertising can’t make them want it—at least not more than once.  In fact, I imagine this principle is more acutely understood in the digital age, given the diffuse nature of all communications; scattered consumer attention; and the capacity of social media to provide rapid-response word-of-mouth that either endorses or criticizes a specific product or service.  This does not mean, of course, that advertising is unnecessary.  Apple, which is arguably in a class by itself as a brand, also had a reported advertising budget of $1 billion as of early 2013.  Anyone who thinks Apple can just turn that spigot off and let social media platforms enable consumers to “market for them” is smoking both ends of his crack pipe.

Interestingly, marketing a theatrical feature film is a bit like selling a product just one time. The production cost of big movies can be so high and the attention span of the market so brief, that opening weekend, box-office revenue has become an even more critical threshold for many films than it was just ten years ago.  Naturally, Hollywood studios did not create the pressures of this market alone; they had help from the same digital technologies that today provide us consumers with myriad other options to entertain ourselves on any given weekend—or even the opportunity to pirate films rather than to see them in theaters.  So, yes, the marketing urgency is fraught with the need to capture the fickle audiences that remain willing to go to the movies. But advertising is still not going to drive consumers to do anything they don’t want to do.

Nevertheless, a strange, complementary sentiment to the trope that piracy is good for promoting movies is one that wants to believe that the official marketing of theatrical features is nothing but a grotesquely expensive effort to “cram lousy entertainment down people’s throats.”* Some readers may immediately notice the contradiction that if the entertainment product itself is assumed to be lousy and unwanted, there’s really no point in discussing its promotion, either by traditional or piratical means. Yet, this rather obvious hypocrisy is overlooked when the pirate user or promoter effectively says,  “I hate Hollywood and its terrible movies, and besides piracy is good for promotion.”

Surely, if both of these statements are true, then one would want to avoid “helping” the industry one hates. But of course both statements are not necessarily true; and in a macro sense, neither statement is true.  If millions of viewers had, for example, no interest in seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight, these same uninterested viewers would surely not be eager to watch ripped versions of the film on little screens. No, the reason the widely reported, pre-release piracy of this movie was a big deal is because the film is already a big deal—and it’s not the piracy that made it big.  Tarantino’s track record and his cast of famous actors were not exactly suffering from obscurity when the group calling itself Hive-CM8 decided to leak the film ahead of its theatrical release. And the suggestion that this kind of blockbuster film needs the pirates to “promote” their movie is adorably silly.

Fueling this rationale, though, it seems it has become more common for consumers—or at least piracy apologists—to feel they have been “ripped off” whenever a film is disappointing.  This trend, if it is a trend, is a strange way to approach the experience of moviegoing.  A film isn’t a fifteen-hundred-dollar appliance you rely on in your home every day; it’s two hours of entertainment shared with family or a date or friends.  It’s an experience that, even if it’s bad, provides a basis for discussion or thought or criticism or ridicule. I say this as someone who likes far less mainstream fare than many viewers; and so I don’t really understand the “consumer protection” attitude being applied to entertainment through the filter of rationalizing piracy.  After all, I would never walk into an Avengers film expecting anything other than spectacle and fight scenes and banter; but I would also never walk into a Spike Jonze movie thinking, “Man if he doesn’t deliver as well as his last film, I’m going to demand my money back.”  That just isn’t how it works.

When I took the family to see the new Star Wars film, I was exactly as entertained and ambivalent as I expected to be because I have never been a big Star Wars fan (cue hate mail). Yet, despite knowing this about my expectations when I entered the theater, I didn’t haggle with the guy at the ticket booth and say, “Look, I’m only half as eager to see this film as that dude wearing the wookie shirt, so I think I should pay half price.” Neither did I go see The Force Awakens against my will because its marketing made me do it. General curiosity and something to do with the kids is ample reason to go to the damn movies.

Cultural experiences, whether high or low-brow, don’t come with warranties. They are, by nature, experimental.  And, it’s very rare to find creators who produce great stuff without also producing not-so-great stuff. Meanwhile, audiences differ on their views about the “best work” anyway. So, as with most advertising, motion picture marketing is largely about letting consumers know the product is out there, while a prospective viewer often knows his/her own interest level the moment a film is announced to be in pre-production or even development.  Beyond that, it’s a huge damn gamble, and when it comes time to release, the marketing professionals are asking themselves, “How do we get a critical mass in the seats on opening weekend?” But they still know that if that first wave of viewers walks out tweeting “This film sucked,” that’s the ballgame.  A $100 million investment that can be DOA in a single night—whether you love or hate the film itself—is a marketing challenge predicated on exactly the opposite logic of “forcing” unwanted products onto the consumer. It’s knowing the consumer will make or break you with the swipe of a thumb and praying you’ve met or exceeded her expectations.

If piracy were really about promotion or exposure, then the pirate sites would ignore Hollywood blockbusters and pre-releases of big films—which are apparently all bad products “forced” onto the public anyway—and the most-pirated films would be independent, small, and obscure works that are simply never going to be hugely popular. (Not that I advocate pirating these works; I’m simply alluding to a hypocrisy in the promotion argument.)  I recognize of course that there are viewers who use pirate sites to access harder-to-find or “out-of-print” titles, but if the piracy market were limited to these audiences alone, the entire ecosystem would shrink by orders of magnitude overnight; and this whole conversation would be very different.  As it stands today, though, there would be no movie piracy without Hollywood blockbusters; and those films really don’t need help with their marketing.

*One finds this theme more often in comments sections than in the body of articles and posts, but it is not an uncommon theme.